GBBO Challenge Week 2: florentines

I must confess that I have always thought of florentines as chocolate with topping rather than a biscuit with chocolate...more fool me.  Second week of the Great British Bake Off was all about biscuits, and the bakers faced florentines for their technical challenge.

Second confession - I didn't use Mary Berry's recipe!  I was given the Green & Black's Chocolate Recipes book for my birthday and this seemed like the perfect opportunity to use it.  Unlike Mary's recipe, this one uses double cream - an extra touch of decadence that seems rather appropriate for a biscuit that is at the fancier end of the biscuit scale!

Fresh from the oven

The recipe itself is easy enough to follow.  These biscuits are full of flavour, and you can easily adapt to suit your taste.  Almonds feature heavily, with cherries also in there.  Orange peel is usually added - not being able to find this in my local supermarket I substituted mixed fruit and peel.  (The result, when combined with the milk chocolate topping I opted for, was a bit like eating Cadbury's dairy fruit and nut in biscuit form!)

The Green & Black's recipe didn't specify which type of sugar to use.  Mary Berry uses demerera sugar; not having this I went with light brown sugar which I thought would complement the flavour of the almonds and fruit.

Green & Black's suggest using a fork dipped in cold water to flatten the spoonfuls of biscuit mix before putting in the oven, and this certainly did seem to help.  The tricky bit is cooking them for just long enough - and no longer!


I erred on the thicker side with the biscuits - but at least that meant that I didn't get any chocolate bleeding through and it made for a good biscuit.

Dark chocolate is what you would expect, but I went with milk chocolate (having been given some when I was given the book it seems appropriate to use it for the first recipe I tried).  Of course, milk chocolate takes longer to set than dark (I was impatient and used the fridge to speed things up!).

For my first attempt, I am really pleased with these.  They aren't as delicate as the florentines that you might find in Betty's, but they were rather tasty - lovely with a cup of tea - and they certainly seemed to go quickly, so I must have done something right!